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An Interview with Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramann

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An Interview with Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramann EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES www.necsus-ejms.org Film studies, feminism, and film curating in Germany: An interview with Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramann Julia Leyda & Chris Tedjasukmana NECSUS 9 (1), Spring 2020: 53–68 URL: https://necsus-ejms.org/film-studies-feminism-and-film- curating-in-germany-an-interview-with-heide-schlupmann-and-ka- rola-gramann/ Keywords: feminism, film curating, film studies, interview This interview arose out of a shared desire to document some of the unwrit- ten, anecdotal history of film studies and the cultures of cinema more broadly. In a conversation with Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann, film and media scholars Julia Leyda and Chris Tedjasukmana encouraged them to narrate some of their individual and intertwined personal, political, and professional experiences surrounding the development of the discipline in Europe, knowing that this was enmeshed with other fertile intellectual movements like critical theory and feminism. Karola Gramann is a film curator and author who has been working as a programmer in an international context since the early 1980s. She was direc- tor of Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (1985-89) and co-organiser of the Frankfur- ter Filmschau (1990-93). Together with Heide Schlüpmann she has written on Asta Nielsen, feminist cinema, and erotic cinema. Heide Schlüpmann is an author and retired professor of film studies at the University of Frankfurt am Main (1991-2008). She is the author of The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema (2010 [orig. in 1990]) and other books (in German) on feminism, film philosophy, Siegfried Kracauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. To- gether they are the co-founders of the Kinothek Asta Nielsen in Frankfurt am Main, an association supporting and documenting the film work of women. They also co-founded the Remake: Frankfurter Frauen Film Tage (Frankfurt Women’s Film Days) and have been editors of the journal Frauen und Film. NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES Both have received numerous awards for their continuous efforts in docu- menting and promoting cinema culture. Education at the movies Julia Leyda: What brought you to film? Was it connected with your ex- periences in education or in politics or feminism? Karola Gramann: Film was not part of my upbringing. I come from a more working-class background. In my family, then, culture, in a rather petty bourgeois way, had to be high culture. Film, of course, did not belong to it. It wasn’t until I moved to Frankfurt in 1970 that I was able to go to the movies. This was at the beginning of a film movement, which eventually led to the founding of the Kommunale Kinos [municipally funded cinemas.] It was an incredible experience just to ‘live in the cinema’. I realised that if I ever went to university, which was not before 1976, I’d like to do something with a con- nection to film. This is how it started, because at that time the first seminars were held in Frankfurt and Heide started to teach. Heide Schlüpmann: I come from a bourgeois background. Cinema was not very highly valued, but sometimes my father took me to the movies. He chose literary adaptations and afterwards he always said that the film couldn’t live up to the novel. My mother had a special experience of cinema during the Nazi period – the men having been conscripted, it was mostly the women who went to the movies together. As a young girl she had been impressed by Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen (1924). After having been at the Universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen, I moved to Frankfurt to study philosophy with Theodor W. Adorno, and here I first saw the early films of Alexander Kluge, and it was as if he was telling my story. But cinema did not play a central role. That came only when I ex- perienced a major crisis in my life as a philosophy student. There was the student movement and I was very much attracted by what was happening. In 1969, Adorno died, but even before that, I had stopped working on my thesis. I didn’t know which direction to take, and so I went to the cinema, during the day, at night – to all the cinemas I could find in Frankfurt. And in winter 1970-71, one event had a big effect on me: a screening of underground movies at the university, in the same rooms where the teach-ins were before and where Adorno had held his lectures. Now in all these rooms they screened films, underground films – that was great. After that, the Independent Film 54 VOL 9 (1), 2020 FILM STUDIES, FEMINISM, AND FILM CURATING IN GERMANY Center (later: Kommunales Kino) was founded in Frankfurt in the Theater am Turm where Rainer Werner Fassbinder worked with his company. I saw Soviet cinema which impressed me very much, and I saw Freaks in a late night program of horror movies. Whenever I could I went there and to other cinemas: in those days, you could see films by Kluge, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Jean-Marie Straub in the city center in an average cinema. Gramann: What made the biggest impact on me was the experience of being with so many people and sharing the films. I remember, when the Kommunales Kino opened, they held a Buster Keaton retrospective. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there! It was a new experience. It brought me out of my isolation, I felt. I was in the closet and living with some- body. But to go to the movies was a totally different group encounter. It was really wonderful! Schlüpmann: I didn’t have this shared group experience the first time. For me it was the anonymity in a crowd of people. And strangely, it didn’t scare me, I enjoyed it. LEYDA & TEDJASUKMANA 55 NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES Chris Tedjasukmana: When did you two meet? Gramann: I knew about Heide because she was around at the university. A lot of people talked about her: she was the great enigma, suspected to be moving the Hegel books from one side of her desk to the other and back again. At least that’s what people said, that she was always there, studying He- gel. Tedjasukmana: Sexy. Gramann: And she was the fancy of a lot of women, so I thought: I would like to meet this person, too! Film studies before film studies Leyda: At which point did you connect your interest in cinema with your academic research and philosophical questions? Schlüpmann: I started to give seminars at the University of Frankfurt in 1977. I think I was the first person explicitly teaching feminist approaches to- wards film, so all the women who had built a strong group at the university, discussing and taking action in feminist politics, attended. We also met out- side of the seminars and had other discussion groups. My first two seminars dealt with women in Nazi cinema. But then I started a course on feminist film theory and practice, and there came a person with a glittery tie, very chic, a little bit punky. She told me she knew Laura Mulvey and that she was just about to translate ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Gramann: It was rather daring! Schlüpmann: I thought she was quite ahead of me in feminist film studies. And it was clear to me that she was a lesbian, so I got interested. Gramann: My first trip abroad was to England in 1965, in the midst of Beatlemania. London to me, coming from the north Bavarian provinces, was just a revelation. When I decided to go to university many years later, I stud- ied English literature, because at that time the BAföG [student financial assis- tance] would pay for one year in an English-speaking country, so I went to London for one year. I had been to the BFI summer schools twice, with teach- ers like Christine Gledhill, Angela Martin, Jim Cook, and others, and the big- gest influence on me – apart from Heide, of course – was Richard Dyer. I took evening classes with him, and that was such an eye-opener, even apart from his way of teaching. In 1977 he edited a booklet for the BFI titled Gays and Film, with articles by Caroline Sheldon, amongst others, and which was 56 VOL 9 (1), 2020 FILM STUDIES, FEMINISM, AND FILM CURATING IN GERMANY the first to my knowledge. That was when I also became acquainted with Helke Sander, the editor of Frauen und Film, who published a book with Gislind Nabakowski and Peter Gorsen, Frauen in der Kunst [Women in the Arts]. I met Helke, and she said: ‘Don’t you live in England? Maybe you could translate this article.’ I knew Caroline and I’d been in this whole lesbian circle in London and I knew the films. In fact, I’d done two classes reading Laura’s article at the BFI summer school, so I thought, why not? Obviously I was ra- ther fearless! Schlüpmann: And in 1978, when I held my seminar on feminist film the- ory, we went together to London for a big avant-garde event at the National Film Theatre. The year after, we decided to go to the Edinburgh Film Festival, where a feminist event took place. There were film screenings and a panel discussion by people like Christine Gledhill and Claire Johnston, also Helke Heberle from Frauen und Film. We were familiar with the journal, but I was not involved in it at that time. Afterwards, Frauen und Film asked us to write an article about the feminist event.
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